Reproducibility package for Policy Pulse: Sensing The Sentiment Of Climate Policies In The Public Sphere

Public sentiment towards climate policies plays a critical role in their adoption, implementation, and effectiveness. This paper introduces a novel methodology for assessing policy sentiment from news media articles for the period of 2017 – 2023, applied here to climate policies. It focuses on two policy instruments that have received significant public opposition in recent years: carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes. Results show that sentiment scores for each article align with intuitive notions of positive and negative sentiment, and average sentiment scores at the country level are reasonably well aligned with public opinion surveys associated with each instrument. Sentiment time trends also map on well to key well-known public protest events such as the Yellow Vests protests in France. Sentiment is more positive for emissions trading schemes compared to carbon taxes, and this result holds across all income and regional groups. Findings further indicate that sentiment towards both carbon taxes and emission trading schemes has been improving over time. Given its cost-effectiveness, scalability, and timeliness in comparison to traditional surveys, this study offers a valuable and broadly applicable tool for tracking the pulse of policy sentiment in real time across a wide range of policy domains, including but not limited to climate policy.